


More than One

by JPlash



Category: X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) - Fandom
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Death occurs offscreen, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Mild Gore, Past Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-28
Updated: 2014-05-28
Packaged: 2018-01-26 21:33:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1703318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JPlash/pseuds/JPlash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sean’s body is long gone, reduced to grey autopsy spectres and memory.</p>
            </blockquote>





	More than One

**Author's Note:**

> So after the half a moment Sean's dead mention in the movie, I needed to write something for Sean, and I went home and wrote a bunch of scrambled fix-it bits and pieces...then today (i.e. ten minutes ago LOL) I wrote this, because nobody in that movie got the time to grieve (I loved the movie - that's what we have fic for <3).

***

Sean’s body is long since gone: sliced by machine at the waist; the bottom half into the industrial furnace, mingling with friends and enemies and general waste; the top half broken into its useful component parts for proper study—the ears and the aural cavities and their capacity to handle that range of pitch and volume, the lungs and the tubes exiting them like vacuum pipe and the tiny pieces inside and any part really could hold the key in that regard. Samples of spinal tissue, of marrow, of skin, blood, bone. The rest—the eyes, the nose, the hair, the freckled cheeks, the lips—join the feet and the legs and so on and so forth in ashy anonymity.

So Sean’s body is long since gone.

Instead, the casket holds autopsy photos like grey ghosts, and a precious few where he’s alive, before. Images of the corpse and of the spirit that moved it, both gone, neither forgotten. There’s one of his t-shirts, left in storage at the mansion with the knickknacks and keepsakes and clothing and little life’s work of twelve young men and women who were coming back to claim them (and some even did—but not many). There’s his first set of gliding wings, damaged and replaced but kept all the same. The mug he liked to use, courtesy of Alex. Some crude cartoons he scrawled on baking paper.

There are flowers, from the garden, which he’d laugh at were he here but secretly be pleased that someone cared.

More than one.

They stand before the casket and its contents and say things that aren’t rituals: memories, thoughts, the briefest goodbye, nothing at all.

They dig the hole together, though not Charles, and it’s mostly Hank and Alex. The hole isn’t rectangular as such but it’s a hole.

They bury him—what they have of him, what they remember of him, what they love of him—and put his name on a stone.

Sean’s body is long gone.

It was never the body that mattered.


End file.
